Chapter 6. Towards an understanding of the epistemology of technology-enabled
6.5 Personal reflection on the DProf process
The DProf by Public Works will go down as one of my life’s great expeditions. My challenge was to retrace trodden paths, unravel the many strands of my professional experience, and then to rethink and realign. I dissected the assemblages of artefacts, people, dialogues and technologies that make up my working life, tested the connections between them, and sought pattern and coherence. In doing so, I was mindful of my position as a reflective practitioner, somewhere between inside and outside, oscillating between theory and practice, and
beginning to think about ways in which practice might lead to theory (Kahuna, 2002). The threads are various: computing, digital literacy, online learning, international projects, assistive technology; as are the works themselves: articles, books, websites, communities and MOOCs. Although technology is present across these, I am aware that, at its best, it is an invisible conduit that enables us to make, store, and access meanings in new ways, to reconceive the content and the relationships that bring teaching and learning alive. Most of
My real inspiration is the groups of people I have been privileged to join, their enthusiasm for learning with technology and their creativity that so often takes us somewhere new. I marvel at the way communities take on a life of their own as participants become prosumers,
creating and sharing knowledge, and I am proud to set their pendulums in motion. Over the course of this year, I gained insight into the rich multi-layered forms and
functionings of these communities, and into the complexity of relationships between people and technologies within them. I am excited to investigate ways social learning informs the evolution of innovative pedagogies. I have also acquired a better understanding of what it means to be embedded within the research process, and of the power of intimacy and subjectivity in enabling me to tune into participant voices and the counterpoint of their stories.
For me, the DProf journey has been a creative experience, which resulted in outcomes to build upon in the field of social constructivist learning. It redefined my relationship to the field and led to reflexivity within the culture of TELCs. In many ways, I have been a virtual ethnographer working at a distance from my participants. This positioned me at an
intersection of person, practice, research and theory. From this nexus I have analysed my own experience in relation to theory, methods and literature and this shed light on the
intertextuality of my works. Through an iterative process of selection, observation, vignettes, reflection and analysis of notes and artefacts, I identified emergent themes, discerned patterns and arrived at some tentative conclusions about the topology and typology of TELCs that merit further testing. This fulfilled the overarching reflective theme of how the public works illuminate ways in which technology can facilitate high quality social learning in online and blended environments. The reflection also addressed reflective themes relating to computing, digital literacy, and pedagogy and practice in social learning supported by technology. The process of writing the context statement gave me time and space to create rich
descriptions and through them to tease out conclusions about how they worked as vehicles for collective knowledge building. I was keen to develop ways of understanding the process by which practitioners engaged with the communities and under what conditions they were prompted to change their beliefs and/or practices, taking this as a measure of impact.
There was a sense of the unknown in that I needed to develop the confidence to trust my own convictions within what was for me a new field of research. Tensions arose in sampling the works to tell a coherent story and yet demonstrate impact; in creating a simple tool to describe a complex phenomenon; and in not knowing what the end result might be within a field of fast paced change. The methodology was untidy in that it shifted during the process of analysis and writing, and researcher bias was both a strength and a weakness. In the event, it was within an unfamiliar environment across the other side of the world that the forms and dualities in Chapter 6 took shape through multiple instances of drawing and thinking whilst supporting students on a summer school placement. This experience suggests that there is value in stepping outside of the box and combining familiar and unfamiliar physical and digital habitats. Overall, the experience of reviewing the works and writing the context statement has been a transformational process which has resulted in new understandings.
I take away a desire to put my new knowledge directly to use. My next steps will be to refine the analytical tools and test their applications to ensure that they have a positive impact on my own practice and relevance to others. I aim to continue to harness the social and
connective affordances of technologies, and use them to enhance the way we teach and learn. My contribution is a characterisation of the landscape of technology enhanced learning, involving the typology and topology of TELCS, towards an epistemic understanding of what knowledge and knowing look like within them from personal and collective viewpoints, and how this leads to transfer to practice. The outcomes include the mapping of TELC topologies and typologies outlining key forms and features of the technology enabled learning landscape in online and blended environments. In this way, the context statement makes a contribution to the debate around contemporary theories of learning in our digital age.
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